ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on America's views and interactions with the Middle East during the earliest years of the Republic. It examines how many Americans in this period held a distorted image of the region and Islam, and these misperceptions contributed to the Tripolitan War. Eighteenth-century American and European literature made the Muslim world a counterpoint to the idea of individual autonomy, the central feature of the emerging American ideology. American misunderstanding of the Muslim world rested on a profound ignorance of the Islamic religion, Muslim society, and the wild misinterpretations of the prophet Muhammad, who was known to eighteenth-century European and American writers as "Mahomet". Humphrey Prideaux had planned to write a major work on Constantinople's fall to the Muslims in 1453. Prideaux's "Mahomet" was a warning sign in the young American republic of the 1790s. Many Americans welcomed the French revolution that enshrined liberty and reason in the place of monarchy and tradition.
